Yardsmart: Plant broken tulips after veggie plants wither

Maureen Gilmer

Tuesday

Sep 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMSep 27, 2011 at 7:01 PM

As the cold descends, insert your broken tulip bulbs into your raised beds and food gardens to sow miracles. Don't be afraid to pack them in. They will rise and bloom long before spring planting while hoarfrost still whitens the mornings.

I'm not excited by uniformity. What I want is a tulip that is unique unto itself.

The only way I can find true satisfaction in this regard is with the broken ones. In that dead zone in your yard, after the vegetables have withered with frost, this is the place to bring broken tulips into your garden and your life.

Such tulips are not popular among those who wish to be safe and predictable. They began as diseased forms of flowers that interfered with the distribution of color in the petal. The virus damaged the production of hormones that control color, resulting in erratic distribution of it within the bloom.

This was over 300 years ago, and since then, the broken ones were stabilized in the genes because the virus could, over time, degrade vigor. A first-generation afflicted would yield a weaker second generation, and so on until only spindly plants and small irregular flowers resulted.

Stable broken tulips became grouped under a tragic name of Rembrandt, the artist who did not paint flowers but people. This name hardly describes the singular potential of what lies inside every tulip with broken color.

Do not be intimidated by the tulip because it was your mother's and grandmother's highbrow favorite. Those were only the dull identical kinds that had little fire in them. These broken ones are actually among the simplest plants to grow. They are the "plant 'em and forget 'em" sort of thing that you do on an autumn whim, inserting them between withered corpses of pepper plants and dry beans as a promise of spring surprises.

If you surrender the idea of their coming back year after year, you can enjoy tulips for the brief miracles they are. For no flower comes with more surprise and celebration as these, at the end of a dark winter when the burst of broken color stands out like living flames in the still-dormant landscape.

As the cold descends, insert your broken tulip bulbs into your raised beds and food gardens to sow miracles. Don't be afraid to pack them in. They will rise and bloom long before spring planting while hoarfrost still whitens the mornings.

To find the greatest selection of broken tulips that don't require you to buy them in mixed groups, visit TulipWorld.com, where they focus on this remarkable flower. Each tulip variety is shown in its own photo. For about $10, you can take the leap with a bag of bulbs ready to go into the ground at season's end.

You'll find the best broken varieties under Parrot Tulips, which are not only broken but twisted beyond belief into an appealing grotesque beauty. The Viridifloras are stranger yet, and even the feminine Lilly flowered forms are rich in broken color.

Take the leap this fall and turn your dormant food garden into an expression of nonconformity. Make it your own. When the flowers are large and far from perfect, cut them to bring indoors as a celebration of your distinct individuality.